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Puffs with Chicken, &C

A puff pastry filled with chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon peel, shallot, spices, and béchamel sauce, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Puffs with Chicken, &C

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. In a pan, combine chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon peel, shallot, cayenne, and mace.

  2. Add béchamel sauce and heat for 5 minutes over medium heat.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then roll out the puff pastry thinly.

Shape and fry

  1. Cut the pastry into squares and place some filling on each.

  2. Fold the pastry over the filling and seal the edges with a fork.

  3. Fry the puffs in boiling lard until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried parsley underneath.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Béchamel sauce
Binds the filling together and keeps it moist so it does not dry out when cooked.
Chicken
Provides the main body and substance of the filling.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour and a firmer texture to the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, crisp shell that puffs and browns when fried.
Lard
Fries the puffs quickly, creating a crisp golden crust with rich flavour.

The step that matters

Sealing the edges of the puffs. If the edges are not sealed firmly, the filling can leak into the hot lard and the puffs may open or burst while frying. A tight seal keeps the filling inside as the pastry expands.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon, shallot, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, ham, anchovy, parsley, lemon, shallot, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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